Reimagining adult education and lifelong learning for all: Historical and critical perspectives

Transforming adult education through critical feminist theory: Towards a critical consciousness learning model

“…Moreover, adult education envisions a future that necessitates a fundamental departure from the current societal and economic frameworks (Benavot, et. al., 2022).…”

The Faure report: 50 years on – Editorial introduction

“…More recently, lifelong learning has been emphasised as the responsibility of the individual to engage in ongoing training and skills development (OECD 2019;World Bank 2011;Deuel 2021). As a consequence, public policy around adult education, which was traditionally associated with lifelong learning and highly valued in the Faure report -to the extent that Peter Jarvis called the report "almost certainly the most influential book on the education of adults in its period" (Jarvis 2014, p. 49) -has been marginalised (Benavot et al 2022). That marginalisation is not only related to the focus of international agendas such as Education for All on school education, but also to the demise of the strong citizenship tradition and roots in democracy of adult education that are no longer considered relevant in today's "skills" society (see the articles by Biesta and Black in this issue; Elfert 2019).…”

“…It put forward its report Reimagining our Futures Together: A New Social Contract for Education at the end of 2021 (ICFE 2021a), building both on the Faure report and a subsequent UNESCO report commissioned several decades later, the Delors report (Delors et al 1996). There has also been recent attention to many of the Faure report's key themes, notably the re-emergence of the concept of lifelong learning in the fourth Sustainable Development Goal, SDG 4 (Benavot et al 2022;Elfert 2019); debates about the shortcomings of global governance of education and the education for development agenda in the era of the SDGs (Burnett 2019;Unterhalter 2019); and renewed questions about the contradictions between the visions and realities of education provision (see Sara Black's article in this special issue).…”

Commitments in search of a world in which they can be delivered

“…We can no longer afford to be neglectful of non-Western values and ways of being and thinking. Just, peaceful and sustainable futures may depend on the sincerity of efforts to decolonise education and on our being open to and willing to start conversations with this sort of difference (Benavot et al 2022 ).…”

“…The first article, “Experimenting with a global panacea: UNESCO’s Fundamental Education programme in China, 1945–1950”, by Yarong Chen , considers the impact of UNESCO’s first flagship post-war education initiative, the Fundamental Education programme, in China. As quoted by Aaron Benavot et al ( 2022 ) in the previous issue of IRE , the programme, which was established in May 1946, proposed “an attack upon ignorance by helping all Member States who desire such help to establish a minimum Fundamental Education for all their citizens” (ibid., p. 168). The idea of “fundamental education” encapsulated UNESCO’s holistic, humanistic approach to education, aiming not merely to promote functional literacy (critical though this is) but also to support people in living “fuller and happier lives” (UNESCO 1949 , p. 9), regardless of their age or situation.…”